Not easy to answer at the best of times. Even harder when it's being asked by elementary school students.

"When I know, I'll share it with you," Hygiene Elementary principal Mike O'Donnell told his students following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "But right now, I don't know why either."

A question almost as difficult faced the teachers and principals of the St. Vrain school district after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field: How do you inform young children without overwhelming them?

Kathi Jo Walder, who taught at Central Elementary during the attacks, knew the perils. She had been a second-grade student teacher in 1986 when her class watched the space shuttle Challenger explode on TV -- and then watched it replayed again and again as the day went on.

"I remember thinking 'Why are we leaving this on?'" said Walder, now principal at Spangler Elementary School. "It was too much for them at the time."

Lesson learned. One of the first decisions the local grade schools made was simply to keep the day as normal as possible. No canceled classes. No constant broadcasts in the classrooms. In a day of chaos, offer a safe harbor.

For some, normality was easier than others. Burlington Elementary already had classes under way when the attacks began. That meant few questions for the first few hours -- except from parents asking if they should take their kids home.

"We kept saying, 'No, don't pick up your kids; let them have a normal day,'" principal Janice Hughes remembered. "They were safe in the building and we tried to make sure they stayed with us. This is where safety was going to be."

Hygiene, though, had a start time that was after the attacks. About 20 families came to pick up their kids as the day went on, O'Donnell said. Some of the ones who stayed were too young to really know what was happening, he said -- about third grade and younger -- but the older kids were full of questions.

"I wanted to make sure, 'What exactly is it that you're asking?'" O'Donnell remembered. A lot of times it became a chance to talk about, "Well, Mom and Dad said ..." and address a specific worry instead of a vague uncertainty.

"One kid's mom was from another country and asked, 'What if they think she had something to do with it?'" Walder said. "Others had family in the military and had started thinking, 'Oh, no, there's going to be a war.'"

"It stacked into the next week, with some parents still trying to get home," O'Donnell said, referring to parents who had been traveling when the attacks happened and air traffic came to a halt. "For about half a dozen families, that was a big deal. And those stories came to school with the kids."

The teachers tried to keep informed during the school day, so that they could have some idea of what answers to give. (Burlington Elementary, for example, set up a news feed in a literature lab that the staff could check in with.) It helped. Well, mostly.

"The question no one could answer was, 'Why?'" Walder said. There was backup, too. Some of it was official, such as school counselors and offers of help from therapists at the county mental health department. Others just happened to happen, like the parent at Central Elementary who stayed the whole first day just to help out.

"If I needed something, I could walk in the hall and there he'd be," Walder said. "He had a way of making you feel 'We're going to be OK.' I can't think of anything specific he did, but just his presence was helpful."

It helped, she and others said, that the community and the country pulled together so strongly in the first days after the attacks. That gave both a support and an outlet. At Burlington, for example, the children began a penny drive to help the victims.

"There was a huge rise in patriotism," Hughes said. "You wanted to support it. That was positive."

Between parents, teachers and children talking to each other, Hughes said, everyone helped steady each other.

"It shook so many adults," O'Donnell said. "It was complicated. But it came down to, 'School is a safe place. Are the kids feeling safe?'"

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story

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